GregHowley.com

I've been reading a lot of really good books recently. I don't know whether I'm just lucking out or what, because in the past, I've picked some real stinkers. The books that I tend not to like, I quit reading and don't even add to my books list. But recently, I've read some really fantastic fiction. The two books that I want to address here are The Time Traveler's Wife and Little Brother.

I read The Time Traveler's Wife in ten days. I just got really absorbed in the story and in the characters' lives. I really firmly believe that Journeyman cribbed heavily from this book, and while I loved that show, the book honestly does it better in many ways. The differences are interesting - Journeyman took the Quantum Leap route of having the traveler fix peoples lives, with some mysterious person or force guiding the leaps, whereas in Time Travelers Wife, it's completely random. And while the character(s) in Journeyman were made to leap because of some crazy magic comet present during their births, Richard DeTamble's time traveling is a genetic disorder that could be passed along, were it not for the problem of the fetus leaping in and out of the womb. I won't kid you, the book can definitely break your heart at times, but in a very Somewhere in Time kind of way rather than in a depressing way.

The other book is Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. Three and a half years ago, I wrote about reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. It was the first of Doctorow's books I'd read, and I really enjoyed. I have a memory of printing out the story from Craphound.com and reading the printout while sitting in a dentist chair and waiting for the novicaine to start working.

Anyway, Little Brother got a good amount of publicity on the podcasts to which I subscribe. Scott Sigler even included in his podcast feed a large chunk of audio from the book, read by Cory Doctorow himself.

Boy am I glad I bought the book. I read it cover to cover in five days. It's got a liberal bias - it reminds me slightly of V for Vendetta, but it's more realistic. Doctorow paints a very realistic picture of San Fransisco becoming an almost-police-state. The people at the DHS are the bad guys. When they're a bit overzealous in their roundups of suspects following a terrorist attack, a group of high school kids ends up in a Guantanamo-like prison camp, where they're interrogated and humiliated. This is just the start of the book, and throughout it, the tyranny of the DHS grows more and more outrageous, while we see many citizens accepting it due to the fearmongering of the mainstream media.

The book totally sucked me in right from the start. I really need to go look into other Cory Doctorow books, because Little Brother was great, and not just because the author liked to use terms like "teh suck" in his writing. If you want to check out the book, you can download Little Brother free online at Cory Doctorow's site. If you like it, maybe you'll do what I did and start paying for his books. The guy's a good author.

Not sure what I'm going to read next - maybe Terry Brooks's new Shannara series or one of those Batman books I've still got lying around. I can only hope it's half as good as the other stuff I've read recently.